The Curious Expedition studio’s next game Mother Machine lets you co-op as emotional support chaos gremlins created by a lonely supercomputer

As long-time readers will know, I'm a piteous mark for weird little game guys. I’m currently trying to puzzle out what the titular Mother Machine in The Curious Expedition studio Maschinen-Mensch’s upcoming co-op platformer refers to. But, if it’s a reference to forming a parental bond with what the game has saw-me-comingishly named “chaos gremlins”, I'm way ahead of you.

Ah, the press release speaketh! Probably should have read some more before I began exclaiming “Chaos Gremlins!” over and over. Have an announcement trailer.

And here's the deep gremlin lore:

Set thousands of years in the future, Mother Machine takes place on a distant planet once colonised by humans but since abandoned. Left behind by her creators, an Artificial Intelligence faced a problem: without a purpose, she needed to find a way to protect her digital mind from breaking under the burden of being forever alone. Her solution was to create a creature that she could take care of. True rascals, with an affinity for mischief and chaos, these little gremlins were bioengineered by their mother to withstand and survive a harsh alien environment. 3D-printed from organic filament by their godlike Mother Machine, these creatures are tasked to collect and explore a vast cave network of a mysterious alien planet, brimming with biodiversity and peculiar life-forms — but the further the gremlins venture, the more they find out about the dark secrets of the planet’s history, and the true ambitions of their mechanical mother.

They are literally, canonically, emotional support Chaos Gremlins. Brilliant. Mother Machine lets you enlist up to three mates in drop-in co-op to aid you. The more gremlins, the higher the levels of “both chaos and competition.” It also sounds like they’ll be a dynamic difficulty system: “balanced co-op mechanics allow expert players to join together with novices.” Platforming looks to be front-and-centre, but Maschinen-Mensch also refer to Mother Machine an an action RPG. Sounds like this manifests in mutation skill trees, which let you alter and improve your gremlin’s abilities.

The game also boasts “endlessly replayable generative levels,” although what this means in context, I’m not sure. For all the fun in the trailer, I am left uncertain of how Mother Machine will be structured, or even what goals your troupe of disaster lizards are out to accomplish. The trailer above shows one gremlin farting on another. I’d inquire about the practical applications of such an ability, but I think that might be missing the point. It does look good though. Similar appeal to co-op physics sandboxes, I think, just with a good deal more intention and sinew holding it together - enough so that I'd likely still be interested in playing it solo. It's out sometime in 2025.